TRAVEL STORIES: That Time I Accidentally Moved to LA When I Was 23

I heard it’s normal to visit LA and never go home…

On September 15th, 2011, I apologized to my mother for missing her birthday because a guy I had met in Vegas randomly booked me a ticket to visit him in LA the same day. I promised to celebrate her when I got back the following Monday with several glasses of wine, and assumed I’d carry on with my normal life in West Palm Beach where I had just moved into a three story town house with three other girls, and started graduate school for counseling psychology.

Except a series of unfortunate events prior to the Vegas trip had me not wanting anything to do with West Palm Beach at all…

There are three main fails and three main fates that led to me STILL living in LA two years later which I will quickly summarize since it’s a long story, and I’m basing my first novel off it anyway.

Fail #1.  About a month before my trip to LA, I was in the Hamptons with my perfect, gorgeous, PGA golf playing boyfriend who I had been living with temporarily while waiting for my apartment to be ready. My EX happened to live in the same building as him, assumed we were getting serious, so went out of his way to harass us to the point of making my boyfriend break up with me…in the Hamptons…where I had to fly home early from with my new puppy, Oscar. I got back together with neither of them.

Fail #2. Two weeks after the break up, I had to go back to New York to throw a corporate event I had planned for the company I was working for. It was a $150k event which I planned entirely on my own, the venue itself (top of the rock) was $30k and empty, so I had to coordinate rentals, lighting, music, bars, caterers, graphics, and branding…it was an insanely successful party…but the older bald British dude from Ohio in charge of our marketing department who had NO event experience since he was a graphic designer, and OLD, tried to take credit for it after bitching about it for months, so I quit. At the event. And ran around New York the next day by myself.

Fail #3. With no boyfriend, and no job, I was fairly miserable, and when my friends asked if I wanted to go to Vegas I said no because…well I had no reason to not go aside from recently not having a job, and they knew that, so they booked my ticket anyway and told me “Ok well we just bought you a ticket so see you Thursday”. The final day in Vegas, my friend decided to shove a pill in my mouth which I thought was just an Aderall since they were checking bags at Encore Beach Club, but nope. It was a molly. Which I DON’T do, and despise even the thought of. Long story short, I thought I was overdosing to Kaskade, until magically a guy with an FSU hat came by and it somehow snapped me back to life. For some reason he found me incredibly interesting, so much so that he insisted that I came out to LA to visit him the following week.

Fate #1. So I went to LA on a whim to visit this potential serial killer I had just met. I couldn’t stand him, and was about to be bummed, but then got a response from a TV actress girl I had met through mutual friends in Florida that I had Facebooked to see if she was around. She invited me to a party at Zac Effron‘s house, which blew my mind, and after accidentally breaking the sideview mirror off the guy’s car I was visiting on the way home and getting in a huge fight, she offered to let me stay with her. So I changed my flight home back a week.

Fate #2. My new friend would take me to all of her red carpet events, parties, and the hottest clubs, where I met tons of people and connections, we were having so much fun that we decided I should ya know…maybe look into jobs in Hollywood…just in case. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, I hardly even knew where I was, but I applied to anything that I could work for from my computer that I could find. One day I saw an extremely sketchy ad for a housing exchange, you had to work twenty hours for a magazine called LA Splash and would get free room and board in exchange. Somehow I got it, and that was my first writing gig ever. I never stayed at the house because I was terrified of it and ended up back with my friend for another two weeks, but from there I got offered a job writing for Icon Magazine. This was around the time my mother started calling me and saying, “You’re not coming back are you? Where should I send your stuff?”

Fate #3. So now it was about November, I had a job, and enough money for my own place, I just couldn’t freaking find one. I was also looking in the wrong areas. Finally one day I decided that I was going to look at three more apartments in East Hollywood, and if I didn’t like any of them, I was going to go home. They were all disgusting and haunted except one that was way over what I expected to pay, I was about to give up when I got a text message from a girl who I had met through my roommates in FL, who was living in LA and working at a restaurant called Pink Taco. She said, “Hey girl, are you still looking for a place? A girl I live with has a roommate that has to move back home asap and needs a replacement.” …..”YES I’LL TAKE IT”, I replied immediately. I moved into an adorable two bedroom apartment on Melrose and Fairfax that weekend, and discovered the amazingness of West Hollywood.

There’s a lot more crazy things that alluded to my current life, but like I said…it’s a LONG story.

If you’d like to read more about how I left my LA life to travel the world, please check out my book; ‘Yes, I’m a Woman and I’m Traveling Alone’.

*2024 Update: I lived in LA  for 7ish years, and while there, I started traveling when I was 26 and became one of the first travel blogger/influencers, and ended up traveling the world for 10 years and counting. I moved out of LA for good in 2020 to live abroad and continue my travels. Since then I have lived in Barcelona, purchased a home in Tulum, and am currently living in Sardinia for the summer with my fiance.